“Eight days after a gunman claiming allegiance to the Islamic State killed 49 people in an Orlando, Fla., nightclub, the Senate deadlocked, largely along party lines, on amendments to block people on the federal terrorism watch list from buying guns and to close loopholes in background check laws. Families of gun violence victims looked on from the Senate chamber as the votes were held. Further action on gun safety measures or mental health provisions seemed unlikely before the fall election, given the rush to finish a series of spending bills and the relatively limited time that Congress will be in session before November.”

“I get really really tired of hearing the phrase ’mental illness’ thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like ’toxic masculinity,’ ’white supremacy,’ ’misogyny’ or ’racism.’ We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all. We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day—it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.”

“Among African-Americans, there is a particular contempt, rooted in the understanding that black culture was formed in a crucible of degradation, for what Norman Mailer hailed as the ’white Negro.’ Whatever elements of beauty or cool, whatever truth or marketable lies there are that we associate with blackness, they are ultimately the product of a community’s quest to be recognized as human in a society that is only ambivalently willing to see it as such. And it is this root that cannot be assimilated. The white Negroes, whose genealogy stretches backward from Azalea through Elvis and Paul Whiteman, share the luxury of being able to slough off blackness the moment it becomes disadvantageous, cumbersome, or dangerous. It is an identity as impermanent as burnt cork, whose profitability rests upon an unspoken suggestion that the surest evidence of white superiority is the capacity to exceed blacks even at being black. The black suspicion of whites thus steeped in black culture wasn’t bigotry; it was a cultural tariff—an abiding sense that, if they knew all that came with the category, they would be far less eager to enlist.”

“His own fall from grace served as his credential with the kids. Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance), and his message to them was always, in effect, ’Look at me. My father’s on the Central Committee and I’m living in a church basement, but do you ever see me serious?’ The message was effective, but it shouldn’t have been, because, in truth, he was scarcely less privileged for living in a church basement. He’d severed all contact with his parents as a twenty-one-year-old, in 1981, but in return for this favor they protected him. He hadn’t even been arrested for the ’subversive’ prank he’d played on the Republic’s leading literary magazine, the way any of his at-risk charges would have been. But they couldn’t help liking him and responding to him, because he spoke the truth, and they were hungry to hear it. The girls practically lined up outside his office door to drop their pants for him, and this, too, of course, was ironic. He rendered a valuable service to the state, coaxing antisocial elements back into the fold, and was paid for his service in teen pussy.”

“But the secret of 3-D—its central irony, let’s say—is that it isn’t any good for spectacle. Adding a dimension often serves to shrink the objects on the screen, instead of giving them more pomp; trees and mountains end up looking like pieces in a diorama; people seem like puppets. Action, too, suffers in the format, because rapid horizontal movements mess with the illusion and fast-paced edits in 3-D tend to wear a viewer out. Yet the artsy way of looking at 3-D glorifies the format for its decadence, its delicious and despised absurdity. That’s the sense I got last month at BAM, where mindless, stunning films like Resident Evil: Retribution, Katy Perry: Part of Me, and Step Up 3D were juxtaposed, low-meets-high, with experimental shorts. It was as if the mainstream and the avant-garde had been allowed to gather and miscegenate in pure, visual abstraction.”

“Three weeks ago, the photographer Giles Price was on Mount Everest, taking pictures of climbers and their camps—the provisional little tent cities that sprout on that brutal frontier for several weeks every year, during climbing season, and then disappear. These settlements are determined but fragile, heroic but also insignificant—a bunch of colorful little spots on a very large mountain, like splattered paint. Photographed from a helicopter overhead, Price says, the tents ’very much start to look like mankind’s footprint on another planet.’ Price was back in Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, asking for the check at lunch, when the first temblor hit on April 25. For a second, no one seemed sure what was happening; your imagination has to do a lot of work before you can accept that the ground is actually convulsing beneath you. But the shock had a magnitude of 7.8. People caught on quickly. Avalanches on Everest, triggered by the quake, killed at least 18 people, some of them Sherpas hired as guides. But the most crushing stories of devastation continue to come from Nepal’s remote villages, many of which were initially cut off from aid by landslides. The accounts hint at the trauma of seeing an environment mostly taken for granted as stable and secure suddenly disintegrate. There was the house that fell on a little girl who had just walked inside to fetch water. There was the nursing mother who looked up and saw the unthinkable: ’The hills all came down.’”

1. “Richard Corliss: 1944 - 2015” To any fan or friend who would ask whether a new movie was “worth seeing.” Time film critic Richard Corliss had a stock, succinct reply: “Everything is worth seeing.” He meant it.

“Film critics can sometimes be intimidating figures: self-assured, cynical, crusaders for an overlooked masterpiece one week, debunkers of your favorite movie the next. Richard Corliss, Time’s movie critic for the past 35 years, conveyed nothing so much as the sheer joy of watching movies—and writing about them. He savored it all: the good, the bad, the indifferent. Except that he was indifferent to nothing. To any fan or friend who would ask whether a new movie was ’worth seeing,’ Corliss had a stock, succinct reply: ’Everything is worth seeing.’ He meant it. For Time, he was an indestructible, inexhaustible resource. He wrote some 2,500 reviews and other articles for the magazine, including more than two dozen cover stories. He covered, at various times, theater and television, wrote about theme parks and Las Vegas shows, contributed cover stories on topics as far afield as yoga and Rush Limbaugh. And as Time’s longest-serving movie critic (and perhaps the magazine’s most quoted writer of all time), he was a perceptive, invaluable guide through three and a half decades of Hollywood films, stars and trends.”

“The aimlessness is by design. This is no shapely sitcom with memorable, freestanding episodes; the camera shakes, colors are muted, there is no soundtrack, scenes interrupt each other, time advances by skips and jumps. Underneath, Looking seems to sweat. The primary writers are gay men, and in the course of two seasons the hint of autobiography begins to express itself: an improbable, impregnable loneliness. Like Girls, to which it’s often been compared, Looking has replaced consciousness-raising with self-consciousness-raising, the pastime of those whose assimilation has ostensibly put them past politics but who can’t believe that politics are unnecessary when self-acceptance hasn’t been wrought. The effect of Looking is not, as the National Gay Task Force might have had it, to show straight audiences that gay people deserve to be citizens. It is to show that being a citizen only gets you so far when you have never thought of yourself as one. Plenty of people, straight and gay, are sexually immature and romantically inept; but Patrick seems as little ready to connect to another man, in any fashion and for any length of time, as when he was a closeted fifteen-year-old with no sense of being entitled to any rights, hiding what he had transformed into criminal urges under a blanket in the back of a bus.”

“I lost my driver’s license over a year ago. I lose stuff all the time. Credit cards, passports, car keys, cash, books, bags, laptops. It doesn’t worry me, they usually turn up eventually. The last time I was in New York, I left my backpack in a taxi. I had taken three of my kids with me, so I was a little distracted when we got out. All of our passports were in the backpack, as well as my laptop, where everything I have written in the last 20 years is stored. I never talk to taxi drivers, but this one had been so friendly that I ended up questioning him a little. At a red light he even took out a photograph of his children, which he showed me. When we got back to the hotel that afternoon, I asked the receptionist what we could do. He just shook his head and said I could forget about seeing my backpack again. This is New York, he said. But the driver was from Nepal, I objected. And he had two kids. I’m sorry, the receptionist said, I don’t think that will help much. But of course you can report it missing. At that point the doorman came over, he had overheard our conversation and said he knew some Nepalis, should he call them for me? So he did, and I met them outside the hotel a while later. Based on my description, they identified the driver, and the next morning the backpack was waiting for me at the reception desk.”

“Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway. Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, almost filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. ’Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain’t drawn my pistol and don’t want to.’ Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff with his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So did the others, four on horseback and two on the seat of an old buckboard with ’Hines Mortuary’ printed on the side in faded yellow letters.”